The present invention relates to computer systems, and more specifically to techniques for computer system recovery.
Some computer systems today are sold with storage drives, such as hard drive and solid state drives, containing at least two primary partitions. The first primary partition typically contains an operating system, application programs, and user data. During normal operation, the first primary partition is the active, default, or “boot” partition. The state of the first primary partition at the time the computer is sold is sometimes referred to as the “out-of-box” state.
The second primary partition is sometimes referred to as a “recovery partition” and contains a recovery image of the out-of-box state. A user may decide to return the first primary partition to the out-of-box state when problems cannot be fixed, if the storage drive is still functional, by booting to the second primary partition and applying the recovery image to the first primary partition.
However recovery images are of little value if the storage drive fails. Further, restoring the first primary partition to the out-of-box state results in loss of any user data stored in the first primary partition.
Thus, users may perform regular backup procedures on their storage drives. These backup procedures may include backing up the user data, the primary partition, or the entire storage drive. For example, users may create and store drive images in other local storage drives, external storage drives, network storage drives, or in storage media, such as digital video discs, where the drive images will be available when the storage drive fails.
When the computer system fails to boot up, a user may attempt to apply a recently created backup image from a backup storage drive or from backup storage media to the storage drive. Alternatively, or in addition, the user may replace the storage drive with a new storage drive, and then apply the recently created backup image to the new storage drive.
When many computer systems are managed under a service contract by a service organization, reimaging and/or replacing storage drives may be the quickest and most apparent way to fix problems, but it can be expensive for the service organization. Sending service technicians on-site to repair computer systems is a large part of the cost. Service organizations incur additional costs when the service technicians replace storage drives that are still functional.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an improved method of computer system recovery.